A time so long awaited. To be, and not to do. To be sitting at a table at a café-bar, to be slow, to be surrounded by the sounds of Spain. A much-travelled time on the road: places, people, distances, and destinations, and now a grateful pause. Sunday morning in the rather unprepossessing seaside town of Sanlucar de Barrameda.

My page, and my thoughts, equally blank, an opposite to the full cup in front of me. To write about what, I wonder?

A gravelly voice. Years or decades of smoking? The voice climbs a few octaves, forming itself into ‘child words’ and sounds that bring giggles and gurgles from the brown-eyed urchin in her smart, stripy Sunday dress. A long greeting, as is the Spanish way – in both duration and generation – an animated exchange between gravelly voice and her companion, and the child, its parents and grandparents. 

A baby squawks a few tables away. The liquidiser growling of a seasoned drinker. Growl, spit. Throat cleared, a long draw. Brown bottle, red label. Why is it, that most beers in this country have that colour combination? My favourite though, the green can and green label, Mahou Classica. From behind me, metallic brushing across a smooth surface. A spatula I suspect, making its way over the tray on which the freshly deep-fried churros are placed. Crispy, long octopus-like tentacles scooped into large brown paper funnels. A sweet, slightly oily smell, a passing cloud, as an overflowing funnel finds a home at the table alongside us, alongside a glass of thick dipping chocolate, a tease that no tentacles can resist. Especially not here at the Café-bar Churreira.  

A paw print and a label sticking out. Two wailing children. The clatter of crockery being stacked. Not a quiet place! The paw print, a tattoo on a suntanned calf. The label, upright on the back of his thick neck. No, I cannot go and tuck it in. A corner of my red plastic chair has somehow broken off, a jagged edge pokes intermittently into the back of my leg. Not terribly sharp, just noticeable – an underscoring of the need to be still, after ten days of constant motion.

What is it about this country that captives me so? Me, of quieter disposition, and tucked-in labels. An addiction, that requires an annual fix, a deep dipping into this Spanish way of being. Could it be something buried in my genealogy – a connection somehow – a centuries’ old tapestry, woven through stories and legends into the fibre of my being? 

“Stories and legends”. How that phrase enthralled me when I read it yesterday. Stories and legends, the currency of flamenco. Stories, narrated through generations of storyteller-singers and dancers. Stories of passion and emotion, of suffering and celebration. Of life then, and carried into the now. Stories for me, of faraway people. People and stories who are not me,  yet are me. Stories and people that I was so totally drawn into, at the flamenco exposicion, in the intimacy of Seville’s Musio del Flamenco. Drawn into, by the fierceness of the performers, by their passion and emotion, by their commitment, and connection to their art and craft. Not one dancer, a conventional beauty, but each with a depth of beauty that revealed more of itself with each turn, swirl, and foot placement. With the intensity of the gaze, the focus, the total embodiment. 

Duende. Soul. A different word from the one I know. Alma. One of my spiritual sanctuaries along the Camino de Santiago. The Hospital del Alma – the Hospital of the Soul in the dusty, brown meseta village of Castro Jeriz. 

Duende, the place the dancer is said to enter fifteen to twenty minutes into the dance. A trance-like state. Communication with God and audience. A gift to the audience, to be given access to the sacred place. An invitation to step in, not as a partner or fellow dancer or companion, but an immersion into the breadth and depth of the experience. An intimacy, intense yet detached. “You can come with me, but not be with me. I will be me. You make your own choices”. 

Something almost voyeuristic.  Sensuality. Passion. Fire. Her hawk-like nose a complement to her long fingers, and slender wrists. A flesh coloured bandage barely visible in the space between her right hand and the black tassels, that wave from the bottom of her narrow sleeve. Arthritis, the price of decades of her demanding castanets? The castanets, an extension of herself, an enhancement to the tones and textures of the story. No trace of pain. Her movement fluid, expansive, expressive. Energy. Awakening. Building. Faster. The red shoes stamp more furiously. Her flat dancer’s chest heaves. Her back arches, arches a little more. The cantante’s voice grows louder, bolder, more insistent. Everything is heightened. Sustains. Builds impossibly higher. Climax. The last decisive stamp of the bright red shoe. The silence cuts sharp, and deep. The only movement, her heaving chest. Spent. She’s given every ounce. Shouting, whistling, boisterous, whole-being appreciation. Then, a return to silence, darkness in the museo. I collapse into the recess of my narrow wooden seat. Breathless. Satiated. Alive.

The sharp angle of the café-bar’s red plastic chair digs once more into the soft flesh of my right leg as I sit back in my huge exhale.  I breathe back into the now, away from Seville, back into Sanlucar de Barrameda. But still I sit with my question of what connects me so powerfully, so profoundly to this land, why it seduces my soul. A question partially answered perhaps: the sacredness and significance of stories and legends, of wholeheartedness, of taking time to connect – things that course through this country at a cellular level, and somehow similarly, yet differently run through me. A question, whose answer remains for me to live more fully into – a living into, abundant in magic, and mystery.